Bridging: Service provider style

The service provider style bridging configuration allows for customization of Ethernet-based services at the logical interface level. Service providers typically have multiple customers connected to the same physical interface. Using the service provider style, you can configure multiple logical interfaces on the physical interface, and associate each unit with a different VLAN. This provides the flexibility to configure different services for each customer, but also requires more configuration, because each feature must be explicitly configured on the logical interface.

When configuring a physical interface to support only the service provider style, the physical interface must be encapsulated with the extended-vlan-bridge option to support bridging features. VLAN tagging must also be configured on the physical interface so that it can operate in trunk mode and transmit Ethernet frames with VLAN tags for multiple VLANs. Each logical interface is bound to a unique VLAN ID.